Cumbria turns on sexual health EPR

Cumbria Partnership NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with a new electronic patient record for sexual health from Inform.

Programme manager for the project Ian Harrison said the trust required a specific sexual health EPR that was able to handle the sensitive nature of the data by keeping patient details anonymous.

Inform’s “safe, secure system” serves as a full EPR that is standalone from Cumbria’s other patient record systems. It does not require patients to provide full details, such as NHS Number. Instead, they are assigned a unique identifier.

Susan Bunn, Inform's sexual health business manager, explained that a standalone EPR that allows complete anonymity is preferable to a more general EPR. “I could go into a clinic and say I’m Margaret Thatcher, but that would then mess up other data recorded in the system,” she told EHI News.

Patient anonymity extends to a national level. “We can provide assurance that the team for national reporting have no access to patient identifiable data,” she said.

The system can be set up to inform a patient’s GP of updated patient information, although this is only if consent is provided by the patient.

Bunn added that the system is available to support three aspects of sexual health: HIV, genitourinary medicine and contraception. Trusts are able to take the system as a combination of these forms, with Cumbria choosing the full integrated option.

Harrisonsaid the trust met its target to deploy the system by the end of the financial year, but that some “fine tuning” was still required, and the trust was looking to add "more innovative elements" to the system.

He added that Cumbria will use the lessons learnt from the recent roll-out to support the implementation of Servelec Healthcare’s RiO EPR, which is planned to replace i.PM by summer 2016.